Are there still some publishers and developers who have not yet embraced GoG.com's philosophy and if so how hard will it be to turn them around to GoG.com's thinking?

It was really hard at the beginning, as a lot of people were not getting the idea. "Why no DRM? What if people copy our games?" they were asking. I think this was the toughest element to convince our partners about, but we've managed, and once we introduce key partners like Ubisoft or Activision, it gets a lot easier. Also the fact, that our business model works and there is revenue behind older games is really important, as at the end of the day if we weren't performing on the sales side, nobody would want to sell their games through GOG.

I definitely wish we could be signing the deals faster, but I am a realist and I know it's easy to say and do for us here at GOG.com, with our relatively small team and fast decision process, while for big players with big structures things take time. Thankfully we have time, and we will get there. We will have all good old games up on GOG.com sooner than later. So the speed is one thing, and the ownership or legal complications with certain older properties is the other. We have already stumbled upon a few cases, which were way too complicated to be resolved, as one party owned the code to the game, another owned the brand, and then there was a legal conflict on top of that. In such situations we always try to talk to all parties involved and convince them to put it up on GOG.com, but sometimes it's just a no-go. Fortunately such situations are rare. I mentioned the tough ones, but there is also a great advantage of handling older games. Quite often the rights revert back to the developers, and we have an opportunity to work directly with the creators. It's a great thing and we always try to use this opportunity to get some additional materials, conduct an interview, or whatever.

How hard has it been to get some of these older games to run well on modern operating systems?

Glad you asked about that, as I have to give big kudos to our testing team here at GOG.com for their crazy-long hours spent making sure that all of the games work on modern systems. It wouldn't be very useful to gamers if our products didn't actually work on their PCs. As I already mentioned, in the first year we spent more than 7000 hours on testing, and I would say a few thousand hours of programmers' time. How the process looks in brief – we get the games and check them out on a wide range of systems running XP, Vista, Win7 in different configurations. If after the first check it all works well, we play through the whole game on these systems and then wrap it up with our simple installer, test again and off we go... but that's the dream scenario. Normally, a given game does not work on one system or the other, so we have to pass it over to the programmers and they look for the problematic part and fix it, then we test it and ... the procedure basically repeats until we have a fully working game.

The difficulty level really differs; I have to say that Vista was quite problematic for the older games, but we've managed to resolve practically all the problems so far. The toughest cases took us 2-3 months or so, but looking at gamers' comments I have to say it was worth it.

Let's talk about the Activision deal. First did you approach Activision or did the publisher approach you to have their games on your service?

This deal was an interesting case. We actually started the first talks about a year ago, and we started by approaching Vivendi and not Activision. We had some meetings and it was all going really well, they liked the idea, they had great catalog that fit GOG.com's audience really well and ... then the whole Vivendi-Activision merger started and all was put on hold. This was really frustrating for us, although we fully understood the circumstance – it's normal that, when companies merge and sell out part of their assets, most business deals are put on hold... but still we'd almost had Vivendi's golden oldies up on the service – we were quite close. Fortunately once the merger was over, we got in touch with the right people at that time who were already at Activision Blizzard, and here we are. I hope the above will give you a bit of perspective on how time-consuming some business processes are. Dear GOGers – we are really doing our best here :)

Activision is the biggest publisher participating in GoG.com and has a huge array of older games it can offer. First, can you give us and idea of what titles we can expect to show up in the weeks and months to come? Will we see titles like Pitfall, Interstate 76, Dark Reign, Soldier of Fortune..maybe even the first Call of Duty game? Will we see any other older games from Activision's merger with Vivendi Games?

Heheheheh ... I can't spill the beans here, as we have a whole plan lined up and a lot of surprises coming. Let me just say that we have a few of the games you mentioned and plenty others. We are starting with the ones that, in our opinion, are most wanted by gamers (OK – and us, as well ;). There will be both games from Activision and Vivendi – that's a big advantage of the merger that I was talking about earlier. Many great titles coming to GOG.com, so check us out through January at least a couple of times.

Any chance of any older Bizzard games coming to GoG.com under this new deal?

We would love to, but we will need some more time to convince Blizzard. Guys – if by any chance you are reading this – please think about having your classics up on GOG.com – a lot of gamers are waiting for them :)